We have had a wonderful last year here at Open Perception, working on very exciting perception problems with a lot of great people. The current list of customers is equally impressive, including the following companies that have been working with us and supporting our efforts:

In the past year we have also taken a more active role in the OpenNI organization, supporting all OpenNI releases for 3D compatible sensors for all Point Cloud Library (PCL) customers. PCL itself grew from a set of tools that one person wrote to support their work to a set of modern C++ libraries, with documentation, unit testing, and regular releases. A community of more than 550 developers and contributors, with many thousands of users, spread across 6 continents, brought together more than 100 million hits on all our combined domains so far, with more than half a million unique visitors. This is just the beginning!

A few weeks ago we have launched a new Jobs section on the PCL website, to help open source developers to get great jobs at companies that appreciate open source development and PCL in general. We received fantastic feedback, and we can only hope to continue adding more and more similar positions as we receive them from companies or institutes that collaborate with us. In addition, Open Perception is also providing a lot of opportunities and short term contracts for 1-6 months long code sprints. Look out for announcements on the main PCL web site, and get in touch with us if you’re interested!

2012 was a wonderful year, but 2013 is going to be even better. We have big plans, so stay tuned! Thanks to all our collaborators for their support!

Because we are seriously standing by our commitment to make PCL truly cross-platform, today we are announcing the first Open Perception sponsored code sprint — and a very different one at that: Fix PCL on Mac!

What this means is that the lucky participant(s), besides fame and glory, will be receiving financial support through our already established code sprint pipeline, for working on improving the usability of PCL on OS X. See the PCL news announcement for more information, and apply today!

It all begun with a small group of people. Idealists. They wanted to advance the state of the art in computer perception, help solve real problems and build better solutions for people that need them, and learn to collaborate, to stop reinventing the wheel. These people are seeds. Like many others out there. But they learned to put their egos aside and follow in the footsteps of other open source pioneers that have made things like this possible.

There is no beginning and no end to the software that we write. It’s all about the people that write it, those wasting countless hours of their lives to donate something back. It’s about building platforms, that others can use to increase their productivity. It’s about collaboration, the global community. It’s about seeing potential in people. It’s about you.

Today, we are announcing the Open Perception non-profit foundation. Built to support the development and adoption of BSD-licensed open source software for 2D/3D processing of sensory data, or what we call computer perception, we are dedicated to always improve and bring you the latest software algorithmic implementations. Whether you are a student, a researcher, a professional engineer, or simply a hobbyist, our mission is to help you advance your work faster, solve some of those hard problems and allow you to build your applications and do your research better and easier. And we begin this mission with the Point Cloud Library (PCL) project, our large scale, open project for 3D point cloud processing. We think 3D is the future. We hope you do too.

We are not alone. We are building upon the work of other successful open source communities (including Boost, Eigen, OpenCV, and VTK), and with Open Perception we are building a place where we can connect with many other computer vision and perception projects.

This is just the beginning, and we would like to thank everyone that helped made this happen. Please remember that we are an open community, and we really hope you will join us in our efforts.